It's a cool scene that works fine in the movie, but it's too unrealistic to even bother analyzing as something that would work in an amusement park. I'm not sure how the elevator thing worked within the movie, I don't know if the elevator actually drops and is caught at the bottom by brakes and used screens to simulate the brake cable breaking and a screen to simulate it's dropping faster than it really is, or if it's not dropping at all and just uses screens to look like it's dropping, which I doubt that would trick your brain into thinking you were falling. As for the track breaking and repairing itself, that's just not something they could do in reality, and even if they could, why the spend thousands of dollars a year to build these cars and mannequins that are toast after one use most likely. Wow, I just analyzed the scene even though I just got done saying it's too unrealistic to analyze.
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firebox-1
10 years ago
Tracks can "break" themselves by seperating. Rollercoasters like X2, Tatsu and disney worlds expedtion everrest have duel loading stations or as on Disney's ride at one section the track switches and your sent backwards onto a serprate track.
Of course, you can't load a fake train onto a coaster and send it flying off the tracks just to be destroyed since that would cost a seriously amount of money. plus it's a gag that only works once and the public would know before they ever ride it.
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GreyHunter
9 years ago
Since they ended up at the top of the ride, where they get onto the roller coaster, it's pretty obvious the elevator never moved once it finished the initial transit upwards. The elevator used a combination of simulated (filmed) images of the cable breaking and the car falling toward the ground and genuine physical effects to cause the elevator to shake and rattle. The brain is actually easily tricked -- we gauge speed and movement relative to a fixed perspective (a hyper-realistic image of motion on a screen in an otherwise darkened and sealed room can trick your mind into thinking you're the one moving, for instance, because your mind has no other frame of reference to establish whether you or the "external" world is in motion. Or think of it like this: if you're in a vehicle with a perfectly smooth motion, i.e. no acceleration or deceleration, you'd never know you were moving if you couldn't see outside the vehicle. Frame of reference is important.)
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xystophoros
9 years ago
Yup it's the same effect when you're sitting in a stopped train and the train on the next track begins moving...your mind is tricked into thinking YOU are the one who is moving. If you combined that with a rattling, shaking car, visuals of the car falling and sounds like a cable cracking and metal groaning, it would definitely freak people out.
FWIW I very much enjoyed that first scene, it set the stage nicely for the rest of the film when the audience was kept guessing whether things in the asylum were real or just part of Price's game.
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